Kaui

The Garden Isle has always been my favorite.

As a boy, my parents took me to the now-defunct Coco Palms Resort in Wailua which was noted for its flamboyance and Hollywood connections. Many of the rich and famous, including Gene Autry, Liberace, and James Michener popped in over the years, and Elvis’s big hit “Blue Hawaii” was filmed there in the lilly lagoon. That, in turn, spawned a very profitable Hawaiian-themed wedding business. It was also the first place to launch the totally made-up ceremony (but now an integral part of every touron luau) where scantily-dressed natives run through the jungle to the haunting call of conch shells, lighting torches at sundown. Those are some of my most vivid childhood memories.

Kauai is the oldest and one of the smallest Hawaiian islands, located on the northern edge of the island chain. The southernmost island is the Big Island of Hawaii, which is the youngest and still volcanically active.

Kauai is jungle lush, bursting with flowers and color, steeply rugged and rocky, and it’s totally chill. It’s birds singing to the sound of ukuleles and reggae. And a deep, almost syrupy sense of serenity permeates its every pore. It’s a great place to take a nap.

Most of the north side of Kaui is completely inaccessible, so if you want to see it, you gotta fly. So we chartered a chopper with the doors off for the full-on “we’re all gonna die now” experience of a lifetime. The 45-minute death-defying flight took us in a big loop through redrock Waimea Canyon, known as the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific”, and then out over the white-capped, deep blue Pacific ocean as we sped along the shear rock faces of the 4,000-feet tall green velour-like, black basalt mountains that rise from the crash, boom, bash Na Pali Coast like sharp teeth. Every once in a while we would come to a cascading waterfall dripping from the clouds and the pilot would suddenly bank the chopper sharply, so we could get a better look, and I would hold on for dear life so I didn’t fall out. The spinning sense of vertigo was beyond reason and I often had to close my eyes and breathe deep the gathering glory. All I can say is this: I have never seen such overwhelming natural beauty in my life — and I lived at the Grand Canyon and played in the Land of Zion for fifteen years. It just kept coming at us in waves and I literally felt like I was tripping — what we were seeing and experiencing couldn’t possibly be real!

Once we came back down, we drove north along the coast. The Kuhio Highway, or Route 56, is the only highway connecting the east where Lihue (pronounced: Lih-oowey), the island’s largest town and airport are located, and the north side where the second biggest town of Princeville can be found.

We didn’t have the time or strength to go that far, so we just did a 25-mile cruise up to Kapaa, a historic beachside town on Eastern Kauai known for its colorful, eclectic storefronts and food trucks on Main Street, with two side trips along the way to Wailua Falls, a majestic 173-foot waterfall, and the far less spectacular Opaeka’a Falls.

Here are a few random reflections from our first exploratory drive in Kaui.

The speed limit rarely exceeds 35 mph, no matter the road, so it takes a while to get wherever you’re going.

Don’t even think about climbing down a canyon wall to go swimming in an inviting waterfall. After many years of extracting the dead and broken bodies of Darwin Award winners, the authorities will arrest you immediately and hit you with a fine of several thousand dollars.

Chickens rule Hawaii. They are everywhere! They aren’t bothersome, but the roosters can get a little rowdy at times.

Food trucks are the bomb and they are everywhere in Kaui. They tend to focus primarily on poke bowls(raw fish on noodles or rice), pulled pork and barbecue, fish tacos, shrimp everything, and Thai. The food is always exceptional, but not necessarily cheaper than at a sit-down restaurant. We enjoyed experimenting with local cuisine while helping out local family businesses.

We returned around sunset to our Poipu hotel which sat at the edge of world-famous Kiahuna Beach and rested in the soft white sand with a 7-feet-long Hawaiian monk seal doing his best imitation of an old grey log with black flippers as green sea turtles swam by, dodging surfers and local spear-fishermen in black wetsuits with strings of colorful dead fishies.

Yeah, Kauai is different than most places.